The Thirteen Commandments for First-Time Tabletop Crowdfunders

by Matt Holden, Executive Director of the Indie Game Alliance

There’s an awful lot of information out there for crowdfunding creators, and there’s not a lot of consensus. For the most part, every piece of advice you can read is subject to the type of campaign you’re running, your audience, and a thousand other factors. There are no magic bullets and no always-true numbers; there is no one-size-fits-all “if you have X mailing list subscribers or Y followers on the campaign page, you will fund.” In fact, there are very, very few things that are universally good ideas and best practices for every campaign no matter what. So few, in fact, that I’ve tried to enumerate them here.

1. Thou shalt breathe.

Sounds simple, right? In working with hundreds of creators, I’ve seen how astronomical the stress level can be in the ramp-up to a first campaign. It’s important to remember, first and foremost, that almost no crowdfunding campaign is a life-or-death situation for you or your game. I’ve seen hundreds of games fail a crowdfunding campaign and succeed on a relaunch. As I often tell my clients, Kickstarter cannot say “no” - it can only say “yes” or “not yet.” A failed campaign is an opportunity to learn and improve, to act on feedback and to deliver a better final product.

It is far more disastrous to have to deliver on a bad campaign than to retool a failed one. As Shiguru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and the Legend of Zelda, once said, “A late game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.” So, sometimes the backer community telling you to go back to the drawing board on a few things is the biggest blessing you can receive. Not only can it make huge differences in the quality of the product you put out, but it often results in a much more financially viable proposition for you as well. 

Am I telling you to expect to fail? Absolutely not. That said, I do find that creators who go into a campaign with a sense of optimism and not dread do end up doing better in the long run. It’s okay to make mistakes and learn from them, and to avoid analysis paralysis as much as possible. 

2. Thou shalt not engage with unsolicited marketing offers received after launch. 

When you launch a new crowdfunding campaign, you’ll be flooded with offers to help you market, promises of driving tens of thousands of backers to your doorstep, and all kinds of other fantastical promises. Some of them will even back your campaign to get your attention. It is pretty universally true that if you have not heard of somebody before you launch, they cannot help you much after you launch. Many of these offers are ineffective tools at best and actively scams at worst. Most of these vast lists of backers that you’ll be promised have nothing to do with tabletop games and will provide minimal impact at best. There are loads of fantastic tools and services out there to help you in the run-up to your campaign, but once you’ve launched, the die is pretty largely cast. 

3. Thou shalt use Kickstarter for thy first few projects, and then grow out of it.

You’ve probably heard wonderful things about Gamefound and BackerKit as crowdfunding platforms, and they are indeed quite fantastic. Personally, I find Gamefound to be the most comprehensively excellent platform for crowdfunding tabletop games. However, they aren’t the right tool for everybody. To be clear, both are fantastic as pledge managers for first-timers, as is the OG PledgeManager. It’s just the crowdfunding piece we want to focus on here.

Kickstarter, for all of its foibles as the slow-moving 800-pound gorilla of the crowdfunding space, has by far the best discovery tools of any of the viable crowdfunding platforms. This means being on Kickstarter does more to help people who have never heard of you find your campaign than the other platforms do. Once you’ve got enough of a following of your own that you can direct your fans to whatever site works best for you, by all means, consider Gamefound or BackerKit for your campaign. As long as you’re in “we’re still trying to find some fans” part of your company’s lifecycle - your first three or four games on average - Kickstarter is absolutely the way to go. 

4. Thou shalt not have exclusives, deluxe editions, early bird specials or discounts.

I’ve written about this topic at excruciating length in the past, and I won’t rehash all of it here, so here’s the TL;DR. 

There are a lot of backers out there who will tell you, “we want to pay less for the game on Kickstarter than at retail, and we want exclusive content.” Most of those people would gladly pay $1 for your game and not care a whit if it put you in the poorhouse. One of the most valuable services publishers can offer their backers is to stay in business so you can successfully deliver the rewards and keep producing expansions, and you can’t count on anybody but yourself to protect your margins and keep yourself solvent. Most backers understand the difference between a first-time indie project and a “funded $4 million in 4 minutes” project. Offering these sorts of things as a company still building its fanbase effectively punishes people for finding you too late, and given that your marketing budget is probably tiny right now, that’s going to be the majority of the people who might fall in love with your stuff later on. 

As a first-time creator, your website probably doesn’t have a lot of traction in search engines. This means if someone Googles your company or your game - which they will, because they haven’t heard of it - the Kickstarter will come up before anything else most of the time. If someone clicks on your campaign after the game is produced, and sees you charged $20 on Kickstarter, how do you think they’ll feel about paying $30 in the retail store or convention booth they’re standing in? Retailers feel forced to sell the game at the Kickstarter price regardless of what price you told them to charge, and if they can’t make keystone (50% margin) on your game doing that, they just won’t carry it and your game will essentially be a non-starter at retail. 

That’s the ironic thing: backers want a discount for backing on Kickstarter versus buying it at retail, ignoring the reality that the game won’t be at retail at all without backers. A game’s retail availability can’t remotely be taken for granted due to low-quantity print runs and difficulty breaking into distribution. This challenge from backers comes from an unfortunate reality in crowdfunding: larger companies like CMON running Kickstarters for their games sets unrealistic expectations for true indie creators like you. When huge companies make a game, everyone knows it will be available at retail, so they have to find ways to incentivize you to back vs. wait for retail. Those campaigns have trained some backers to expect things like discounts and exclusives that are not realistic or viable for the folks who really need Kickstarter. 

Just like with discounted campaigns, larger companies had to start offering exclusives to incentivize their fans to back rather than waiting for retail. A publisher gets 90% of the money from every Kickstarter copy sold, vs. 35% or so for every copy sold through distribution, so they are highly motivated to sell as many copies on Kickstarter as they can. This doesn’t mean you need to offer exclusives. 

5. Thou shalt be a business and manage thy funds like one.

If you’re a first-time creator, you might still be operating as Sue Smith and not as Sue Smith Games, LLC. It is strongly recommended that you not launch a crowdfunding campaign in that state. Spend the money and get yourself a business license - depending on your state or country, registering a company can cost as little as a hundred dollars. This will protect you from liability if your campaign fails to deliver for some reason - and as the last few years have taught us, the unexpected can easily happen. It’s terrible to have your company go bankrupt over a failed delivery, but that’s nowhere near as bad as having a lawsuit coming after your house.

Your creator account’s name and ID/slug should both reference your company name, which should not be your personal name or the name of your game. On that account, back as many tabletop projects as you can for $1 each. This will do a few things - it gets your name out to many other creators and publishers who also like to consume games, and it pumps up the number of backed campaigns on your profile. This shows the community that you are engaged with them even when you don’t have your hand out for money. 

You should also register yourself two bank accounts under the business’ name: one for the business and one for the project. Use the project one as the bank account on your crowdfunding campaign. Use the project account only for expenses directly related to the project. This will protect you from accidentally spending money you need for the campaign on other stuff. It’ll also ensure that you have a constant eye on the costs and funds available for the project, independent of any other sales channels or products you may have. It’s amazing transparency to be able to easily post a bank statement of “here’s where every dime of the project raise has gone” in an update, especially if things start going south. When every single backer reward has been fulfilled, transfer any excess funds to your main bank account, and then you have as clear of a picture as possible as to what the actual profit margin on your campaign was. 

6. Thou shalt shop around and do the math when setting thy goals.

Selecting a manufacturer and a fulfillment partner/network are some of the most important decisions you’ll make. These two vendors have the power to make your campaign a disaster even if you do everything perfectly. Don’t make these decisions uninformed. You want a little bit of recency bias in the information you use here because companies can start great and go downhill or improve over time. Don’t be shy about asking on social media for recent experiences on a company you’re considering working with. 

Don’t be afraid to be too specific - often times when quotes are wildly different it’s because the services are different, too. Make sure it’s the same cardstock, the same shipping options, there’s no hidden fees - ask a zillion questions to be sure you’re getting an apples-to-apples comparison when checking out quotes. You might be worried you’ll irritate your sales rep, but this in and of itself is a vetting tool - if they don’t want to hear from you when they’re trying to get your money, they’re not likely to be much help to you once they have it.  Quote with at least three vendors every time. Just because a vendor had the best price for project A doesn’t mean they will be even close for project B.

For manufacturers, check out sites like boardgamemanufacturers.info to look into feedback and capabilities of the companies you’re considering. Their list is extremely comprehensive, so if you are approached by a manufacturer that isn’t on that list, treat it as a huge red flag. 

If you’re an Indie Game Alliance member, you have access to a ton of discounts with both manufacturers and fulfillment partners. Make sure you utilize those or any other rabbits in your hat to negotiate the best possible pricing. 

Once you have your pricing, then and only then can you calculate your MSRP / RRP. To do that, we’ll start with the landed cost per unit. Here’s what that means: Let’s say you have a quote for 1000 copies of a game at $1.50 a copy. There’s $500 worth of setup fees on the quote, so let’s distribute that through to each copy, getting our copies to an even $2.00 each. To ship those thousand copies to your fulfillment center, your manufacturer or freight forwarder quotes you $1000. So, dividing the shipping by unit, that’s another $1.00 per copy, so our landed cost is $3.00 per copy. Note that this does not include the cost of shipping it to an individual backer. 

Once you have your landed cost, multiply it by somewhere between 5 and 6, round that to a reasonable number, and that’s your MSRP. So, our hypothetical game should have a MSRP of $15 to $18. Now, and not before, we can determine a goal for our campaign. So, to get the games to me, I need $3,000 for the freight and manufacturing. You may also need to factor in additional art you need or other project-related expenses. For our super-basic example, let’s say that was an extra $500. Once you’ve added up everything you know you need to successfully deliver the game, I recommend padding that number by 10 to 20% for “something went wrong” cushion. So, let’s be super-cautious and do 20%, which is another $700, so now we’re at $4,200. 

Finally, Kickstarter will take 10% of your money as a platform and processing fee, so we’ll need to account for that. But calculating 10% of $4250 doesn't get it done; we need 10% of a bigger number to leave $4250 when we’re done. So, to calculate that, divide your current total of $4250 by 0.9. This comes out to $4,666.67. That’s obviously a weird goal number, so let’s round it to something reasonable like $4700. That’s our campaign goal!

One more piece of math to do - backers to fund. We want to know how many games we have to sell to fund our campaign so we know how much marketing we realistically need to do at minimum. So, let’s assume we chose the $15 MSRP for our hypothetical campaign. We’ll assume that every backer buys the base game, nobody does the $1 lookie-loo pledge and nobody does your $1000 “back this campaign if you’re my mom” level to make the math easy. So, divide our $4700 by $15 and we get 311. This means we need 311 backers to fund the game. At $18 MSRP, we only need 261. When you have confidence you can get enough backers with the mailing lists and other tools at your disposal, that’s when it’s time to launch.

Here’s a quick math recap:

MSRP = (manufacturing cost per unit + freight cost per unit) * (5-6), round to something reasonable

GOAL = ((total manufacturing quote + total freight cost + extra expenses) * (1.1 to 1.2 for padding)) / 0.9 for kickstarter fees, round to something reasonable

BACKERS TO FUND = GOAL / MSRP

7. Thou shalt have adequate reviews and previews. 

As a first time creator, you probably don’t have much of a reputation in the industry. That’s to be expected. It just means we need to borrow other people’s reputations, and that means reviews and previews.

There is ample discussion and consternation about what constitutes a review, a preview, and the ethics surrounding them. Here’s how I view these terms. I don’t say this intending to spark a debate - again, there are plenty of other places to have that argument. Rather, consider this a glossary to understand the terms as they are used in this article. 

A review is written or video content provided by a third party content creator not associated with your company. They are generally not compensated other than with a copy of the game. You should expect absolute objectivity - whether they think that your game is amazing or terrible, they will say so and you should graciously accept that feedback. The one thing you should call out is if they got a substantial rule wrong, and if that’s the case, reach out privately rather than calling out publicly on social media. Even this valid feedback though; if someone who does games semi-professionally can’t figure out the game from the rulebook, your rulebook probably needs some work.

A preview is essentially a commercial. This can be done by a third party or a person associated with your company. They should be compensated in pay according to the size of their audience. With a preview, you - and more importantly, the viewers - should expect positive spin on your game. If content is a paid preview and not a review, it is imperative that this fact is disclosed to backers.

I generally recommend that as a first time creator, you should have at least one major preview. These can cost anywhere from $250 to $750 and up depending on their audience (such as subscriber count). As a general rule, you should be paying at most about a penny per subscriber, so if someone asks for $500 to do a preview, you shouldn’t agree unless they have at least 50,000 subscribers. This content will be used as a commercial, so we’re using the content creator as a megaphone to get the word out far and wide to their followers.

I then recommend three to five reviews. Reviews should be uncompensated or very minimally compensated. Don’t use a reviewer without at least 5,000 subscribers if you can help it; prototypes are expensive and you usually won’t get them back. Before sending a review copy, go through the person’s channel and try to find at least one negative review. That’s how you know they’re willing to do it if needed, and it’s the standard your backers will use when judging objectivity. These will be the folks that give a holistic opinion of the product. Essentially, what we’re looking to do is have a lead singer, and then build up a chorus behind them.

Note that content creation can have a lead time of three months or more, so this can’t be something you put off until a week before launch. Plan for a due date of at least three weeks before you launch so that you have padding in case of delays. 

8. Thou shalt keep thy stretch goals reasonable.

Before we get into this, let’s talk about the origin of the concept of stretch goals. Let’s say a game costs $5 per unit to print 1000 units, but if I print 2000 units, the price drops to $4 per unit. That’s extra profit for you, which is great. Some companies say, I’m budgeting for $5 per unit, so if we make enough units that the price drops, instead of pocketing that extra dollar, we’ll re-invest it into the game in the form of upgrades. 

Carry this forward to how you do your stretch goals. If a stretch goal will not be paid for by savings you earn through larger quantities, it is not a good stretch goal. This means no adding a $5 T-shirt if you make an extra 200 copies. Great stretch goals that are easy to afford include extra cards, better cardstock, upgrading cardboard pieces to wood ones, a vacuum-molded organizer insert, things like that. The one exception to this is if you have a tiny stretch goal that costs you less than ten cents per copy, offer it as a stretch goal that unlocks if the game funds quickly. This encourages people to back rather than watch and wait, and to share your campaign with their community.

One critical thing to call out - if your game does not have miniatures in the base game, do not add them as a stretch goal. Doing so will destroy your timelines - sculpting and molding takes months. Molds can also be extremely expensive, far more than the cost per unit to make the minis once the mold is produced. There’s no way to reconcile the timeline and cost increases with a stretch goal once the campaign is launched. If you think your game might benefit from adding minis, that’s an awesome thing to do a separate campaign for later. When I give consultations, this is usually my first “commandment.” I’ve seen seven companies I consulted for do it anyway. Of those seven, zero of the campaigns were successfully fulfilled and all seven are out of business now. 

Speaking of add-ons, stretch goals should never be add-ons. Any stretch goal should be included in the base game box, not conditionally added on. This becomes a logistical nightmare, and it can result in minimum order challenges that cause more problems than they solve. 

9. Thou shalt charge shipping in thy pledge manager.

Don’t try to build shipping costs into the pledge price for any reward. There are a few reasons for this. The biggest one is that shipping costs might change while your game is being manufactured. You’ll want to include estimated shipping costs in your campaign body, but be very clear that these are estimates and subject to change. Yes, it will bum out some backers if shipping ends up being higher, but the events of the last few years have helped folks come to terms with it. This also prevents shipping costs throwing off the math for everything else you’re paying out of the campaign funds. Plus, it ensures that backers have to complete your pledge manager, resulting in fewer failed shipments because people never logged in to update old addresses.

10. Thou shalt have an appealing retailer pledge tier.

Retailers are people too, and they want to support your game! What’s important to note, though, is that they’re business owners and they have to have criteria to decide what a good investment is for them. Here are a few guidelines that have come from multiple surveys of retailers over the years.

• You should require a minimum of five copies sold.
• You should charge no more than 50% of the Kickstarter price for retail copies.
• You should include one free copy for the store to use on its demo shelf.
• If you can afford to, you should cover domestic shipping. If you can’t, it’s understandable.
• You should insist that your fulfillment partners ship to retailers at the same time as other backers.
• You should not ship any games to distributors until all retail pledges have been fulfilled.
• You should include any extra rewards you gave to other backers (which, again, you should not have in the first place.)

Generally, I recommend adding a $2 pledge reward to your campaign with the description “Retailers and distributors, please back at this level and we will contact you to determine your pledge amount.” This does a few things for you. First, it hides the price retailers are paying from regular backers, some of whom inexplicably don’t understand that retailers have to make a profit on the games they sell. Second, it allows you to negotiate; a distributor buying 1000 copies probably deserves better pricing than a FLGS buying five. Third, it allows you to decide how you want to take the payment. Remember that Kickstarter and the like will take 10% of what you raise on the campaign. If you need that huge order to meet your goal, take it! If you’ve already funded though, you might be better off sending a PayPal invoice after the campaign and only paying their 2.9% fee.

11. Thou shalt protect thy future convention sales.

Some backers tend to get upset if they find a game they backed available for sale somewhere before they have their own copy, and they’re not wrong to feel that way. That said, sometimes the timing works out such that you have no choice. If you booked a Gen Con booth 9 months ago, and your game is still in the process of shipping from the fulfillment center come convention day, you can’t afford to lose that sales opportunity if you can get your hands on games. It might even make financial sense to have the manufacturer air-ship some of them to you so you can have them at a convention before the ship arrives. This is all fine, but be transparent and tell your backers it might happen so they can make an informed decision if it’s a deal-breaker for them.

We generally recommend adding some text like this in the Risks and Challenges section of the campaign:

Demo events and sales spaces at conventions require significant, non-refundable up-front investments and usually must be booked many months in advance, before we can know the exact date the shipment of games will arrive and the exact length of the fulfillment process for individual backer shipments. As a small independent publisher, we can’t afford to walk away from a pre-purchased convention appearance because the games haven’t all been received, and we also can’t afford to skip conventions until the following year and lose critical opportunities to promote the game. In practicality, this means it is possible that you may see the game for sale at a convention before 100% of backers have received their rewards. Because we’re using a third-party fulfillment service that will be shipping games from a separate inventory allocation, we can guarantee that no backer’s rewards will be delayed in any way as a result of a convention appearance.

12. Thou shalt know when to fire thy customers.

People love backing indie creators because they can interact directly with the dreamer who made the thing happen, as opposed to some faceless corporation. You build a great reputation for your company by going above and beyond to help your backers whenever you can. That means cheerfully replacing games damaged in shipping, having patience with late pledge manager completion and address corrections, answering the same question a zillion times, all of that. 

That said, the customer is not always right. It’s hard to call out specific examples of what is a bridge too far, but know that ultimately, such a bridge exists. If a backer just cannot be helped, or if they insist on being rude and disruptive in your comments after you’ve made all reasonable attempts to help them, the best thing you can do is proactively refund them their full pledge and wish them well. Don’t allow one or two malcontents to disrupt a smooth process for everybody else.

13. Thou shalt communicate, especially when it’s hard.

This probably should have been #1, honestly. Backers will forgive a lot of mistakes if you are up front about it. Long silences generally get filled by a consumer’s worst imagination, and “I’m still waiting for an email from the factory” can become “the publisher took my money and is sitting on a beach in Jamaica” really quick in the eyes of an uninformed backer. 

During the campaign, we recommend posting as often as you need to as milestones and information warrant. Once the campaign ends, send an update immediately thanking the backers - whether you funded or not. If your campaign was funded, do an update about once a week while you’re kicking off manufacturing and such. After that, there’s often not a lot to say, but even an update once a month to say “boat’s still on the water and it hasn’t sunk” shows you’re alive and engaged. In fact, most shipping companies have a tracker link where you can see where a ship on the water is using GPS. You should absolutely share this with your backers so they can watch it make its trek across the ocean.

If things go wrong, communicate as quickly and as much as you possibly can. Let backers know what happened, why it happened, and what you’re doing to fix it. Don’t make excuses; you’re a first-timer and mistakes are expected. Show the backers how committed you are to making it right, and the vast majority will forgive just about anything that goes wrong, even if it was directly your fault. 

XIV (BONUS): Thou shalt join the Indie Game Alliance.

Okay, I admit, I might be hugely biased about this, and that’s why I didn’t count it. But even if I didn’t run IGA, it would be hard to faithfully give advice to creators without mentioning how beneficial it can be. Members save 5-25% on their shipping and manufacturing costs, receive one-on-one consultation and coaching, and get access to an army of volunteers ready to promote their games at conventions, for $25 a month. So, like, that’s cool.